Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFCs 791-793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. He wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.

Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. He was the original and long-time .usTop-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.

All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division ("Division 7") of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]

The US takeover of the DNS Root Authority

On January 28, 1998, Postel, on his own authority, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers and instructed them to change the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions (NSI)'s A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. (198.41.0.4) to DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between IANA and the four remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, the .mil server, BRL and NSI. He soon received a telephone call from a furious Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's senior science advisor, who instructed him to undo this change - which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued its "Green Paper" asserting the US government's definitive authority over the Internet DNS root zone.

Death

Legacy

The significance of Jon Postel's contributions to building the Internet, both technical and personal, were such that a memorial recollection of his life forms part of the core technical literature sequence of the Internet in the form of RFC 2468 "I Remember IANA", written by Vinton Cerf. (This is no trivial thing given that between 1969 and February 2002, only 3,240 RFCs were published.)

Postel's Law

Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC 793, which includes a Robustness Principle which is often quoted as "Postel's Law": "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" (often reworded as "be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept").